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Many phonetic changes provide the raw ingredients for later phonemic innovations. In Proto-Italic, for example, intervocalic */s/ became *[z]. It was a phonetic change, merely a mild and superficial complication in the phonological system, but when *[z] merged with */r/, the effect on the phonological system was greater.
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound.
On account of the above, the vowel inventory changes from /iː i eː e a aː o oː u uː/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/, with pre-existing differences in vowel quality achieving phonemic status and with no distinction between original /a/ and /aː/. Additionally:
In phonology, fronting is a sound change in which a vowel or consonant becomes fronted, advanced or pronounced further to the front of the vocal tract than some reference point. The opposite situation, in which a sound becomes pronounced further to the back of the vocal tract, is called backing or retraction .
Part of the phonological study of a language therefore involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. The presence or absence of minimal pairs, as mentioned above, is a frequently used criterion for ...
NOTE: Some of the changes listed above as "unexpected" are more predictable than others. For example: Some changes are morphological ones that move a word from a rare declension to a more common one, and hence are not so surprising: e.g. * þrī "three" >! * þriu (adding the common West Germanic feminine ending -u) and *keːr "heart" (stem ...
Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language.
Evolutionary Phonology (as proposed by Juliette Blevins), building on work by John Ohala, considers phonetic variation as the primary source of phonological change. This emphasis on the phonetic bases of change encourages a continuous dialogue between experimental phonetics and historical phonology. Even if every scholars agree that there exist ...